Smart appliances

Currently, household appliances are responsible for about two thirds of the energy consumed by buildings. Industrial appliances are also major energy users.

In the future, domestic and industrial appliances will be intelligent, networked smart devices, forming complete energy consuming, producing and managing systems, based on the integration of products from different vendors and vertical industrial sectors. The need for all these connected appliances to be able to communicate among themselves and with the service platforms needs to be addressed. This requires open interfaces. Interoperability is thus a key factor in creating an IoT ecosystem, and the availability of a standardized solution, along with related test suites, will be the essential enabler of the IoT.

Smart appliances will include white goods, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems and storage systems.

To ensure such systems are technically and commercially successful – and widely adopted – it must be possible to combine appliances from different vendors. These systems will also need to be able to communicate with service platforms from different energy service providers in order to manage and control energy use.

ETSI Smart Machine-to-Machine communications Technical Committee (TC SmartM2M) actively supports the oneM2M global initiative, especially in relation to European Commission (EC) driven activities, bridging the EC’s needs in the M2M/IoT area and the technical work in oneM2M and other ETSI activities.

Our TC SmartM2M focus is on an application-independent ‘horizontal’ service platform with architecture capable of supporting a very wide range of services including smart metering, smart grids, eHealth, city automation (smart cities), consumer applications, car automation and smart appliances.

TC SmartM2M is looking at the use of this service platform to interface with smart appliances, allowing the interoperability of applications and ‘plug and play’ connectivity.

Smart Appliances have been specified on request of EC DG Connect. The Smart Appliances specifications are based on the oneM2M communication framework complemented with Smart Appliance REFerence (SAREF) ontology. SAREF work has contributed to the foundations of the base ontology of oneM2M Release 2.

Concerning Smart Appliances SAREF extension investigation in the energy domain, direct inputs from EEBus and Energy@home have been included in SmartM2M developments where Energy, Environment and Building sectors are now part of normative work. In TC SmartM2M, other SAREF extension investigation are going on in the domains of Smart City, Industry and Manufacturing, Automotive, eHealth/Ageing-well, Wearables, Smart Agriculture and Food Chain.